20/03/2013

Curelty-Free Cosmetics

As you probably know a lot of products such as cosmetics and medicine are being tested on animals, mostly on rats and mouses but also on fish, birds and bunnies. However animal testing is not only cruel but also completely useless as there are really good alternatives nowadays. Therefore organisations such as PETA tried hard to ban animal testing and also shops like Lush (which sells cruelty-free cosmetics) came up with a lot of demonstrations and tried to make their customers aware of the problem. Last week the EU finally prohibited the selling of cosmetics tested on animals. This means that from now on people in the EU don't need to be worried about the cosmetics they buy anymore.

However this does not mean that animal testing will be disappearing completely because 1. animal testing is still allowed for medicine and 2. it is still allowed on other continents. Now if you live outside the EU or if you plan on buying cosmetics outside the EU you can simply stick to the brands you know will not do animal testing (such as Lush for example) or you can read Peta's list with most of the companies that do animal testing here. The list claims to have been updated today so it should be quite reliable. The list mostly contains brands by the following common groups: Johnson &Johnson, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder, L'Oreal and some more.

What is your opinion about animal testing? Have you been bothered about this issue before and do you think it's good that products tested on animals will not be sold in the EU anymore? What is your favourite 100% cruelty-free shop?

The sad thing is that we need animal testing to some extent - you have to test new drugs on animals first because the other way about it is testing on humans. But as far as cosmetics goes, that's luxury, testing on animals just so some of us can slap some lipstick or eyeshadow on is just wrong.